in their power, viz., books and music, I have not either known or heard of.

One of these sisters furnishes a picture of De Quincey when at home in the Lasswade cottage. One room was set apart for him, where he could work day and night to his heart's content. The evenings, or the intervals between his daily working time and his nightly working time or stroll, were spent in the drawing-room, with his children. and any of his friends or theirs who happened to be present. Of this time his daughter says:

DE QUINCEY AT LASSWADE.

The newspaper was brought out, and he, telling in his own delightful way, rather than reading the news, would on questions from this one or that one of the party, often including young friends of his children, neighbors, or visitors from distant places, illuminate the subject with such a wealth of memories, of old stories, of past or present experiences, of humor, of suggestions, even of prophecy, as by its very wealth makes it impossible to give any taste of it. He was not a reassur

ing man for nervous people to live with, as those nights were exceptions on which he did not set something on fire; the commonest incident being for some one to look up from a book or work to say casually, “Papa, your hair is on fire;" of which a calm "Is it, my love? and a hand rubbing out the blaze was all the notice taken.

This idyllic way of life was brought to a close in the most natural way. In 1853 Margaret, the eldest daughter, was married to Robert Craig, the son of a neighbor, and the young couple took up their residence in Ireland. Two years after ward, Florence, the second daughter, went out

to India to become the wife of Colonel Baird Smith, a distinguished officer of Engineers, whose name appears often in the history of the Sepoy mutiny. Emily, the youngest daughter, was thereafter much away visiting her sister in Ireland or other friends. After this De Quincey lived mainly in his modest lodgings in Edinburgh, where he could best perform his literary work, which now assumed a new direction. The Boston house of Ticknor & Fields had already undertaken, with De Quincey's approbation and assistance, to bring out a collected edition of his Works, Mr. James T. Fields undertaking the labor of collecting the writings from the various periodicals in which they had from time to time appeared. This American edition, begun in 1851 and completed in 1855, is in twenty volumes. In 1853 Mr. Hogg, the Edinburgh publisher, arranged with De Quincey to prepare another edition of his Works. The two editions differ in this: The American edition comprises all the writings of De Quincey (with the exception of Klosterheim, a very poor novel, published in 1832, and never formally acknowledged by him) as they were originally written. The Edinburgh edition not only omits many of the writings entirely, but also in many cases several papers are fused into one. The Edinburgh edition, in fourteen volumes (to which two more were added after the death of De Quincey), bore the title, Selections, Grave and Gay, from writings published and unpublished, by Thomas De Quincey.

During the later years of his life De Quincey

VOL. VIII.-6

had carefully ascertained the least quantity of opium which would render life endurable, and he limited himself to that quantity-a very considerable one indeed. Up to the autumn of 1859, when he had entered upon his seventy-fifth year, his mental power was unabated. He indeed meditated writing a History of England in twelve volumes, which he thought he could complete in four years.

His physical health also was better than it had been at any period during the last halfcentury. But late in October he took to his bed. There was no definite malady; only the physical machine had run to the full time for which it had been wound up. His youngest daughter, who was upon a visit to her sister in Ireland, was hastily summoned to his lodgings in Edinburgh, and found him too weak to bear removal to Lasswade. On the 4th of December, his daughter, Mrs. Craig, was summoned from Ireland. She arrived just in time to be recognized and welcomed by her dying father. He passed away in the morning of the 8th, having been in a doze for several hours, occasionally murmuring some words about his father and mother. All at once he threw up his arms and exclaimed, as if in surprised recognition, "Sister! Sister! Sister!" That sister was the one best-loved of all, who had died seventy years before at the age of ten. That apparent recognition was his last act upon earth.

Though De Quincey's career was distinctively that of a man of letters, he entered upon it at a later period of his life than did any great English author, with the single exception of Cowper. The

Confessions of an Opium-eater, his first, and perhaps his most notable work, was written at the age of thirty-six. That and all the rest of the twenty volumes of his collected Works, were written as magazine articles, and for the mere sake of earning his daily bread-and his daily opium. Except from necessity he would most likely never have written a page for publication. Yet from the reading of his works no one would imagine that any of them were written except because he had something which he must say to the world. For amplitude of learning, subtlety of thought, and magnificence of diction, he has few equals in all our literature. Our citations are from the Edinburgh edition, which contains De Quincey's final emendations.

TWO ERAS IN THE HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE.

There were two groups or clusters of Grecian wits, two deposits or stratifications of the national genius; and these were about a century apart. What makes them specially remarkable is the fact that each of these brilliant clusters had gathered separately about that man as their central pivot, who, even apart from this relation to the literature, was otherwise the leading spirit of his age. The one was Pericles, the other was Alexander of Macedon. Except Themistocles, who may be ranked as senior to Pericles by one generation (or thirty-three years), in the whole deduction of Grecian annals no other public man-statesman, captain-general, administrator of the national resources-can be mentioned as approaching to these two men in splendor of reputation, or even in real merit. No man can pretend to forget two such centres as Pericles for the elder group, or Alexander of Macedon (the "strong he-goat" of Jewish prophecy) for the junior. Round these two foci, in two different but adjacent centuries,

gathered the total starry heavens, the galaxy, the Pantheon of Grecian intellect.

That we may still more severely search the relations in all points between the two systems, let us assign the chronological locus of each, because that will furnish another element toward the exact distribution of the chart representing the motion and the oscillations of human genius. Pericles had a very long administration. He was Prime-Minister of Athens for upwards of one entire generation. He died in the year 429 before Christ, and in a very early stage of that great Peloponnesian war, which was the one sole intestine war for Greece, affecting every nook and angle of the land. Now, in this long public life of Pericles we are at liberty to fix upon any year as his chronological locus. On good reasons, not called for in this place, we fix on the year 444 before Christ. This is too remarkable to be forgotten. Four, four, four, what in some games of cards is called a prial (we assume, by an elision of the first vowel, for "parial"), forms an era which no man can forget. It was the fifteenth year before the death of Pericles, and not far from the bisecting year of his political life.

Now, passing to the other system, the locus of Alexander is quite as remarkable, as little liable to be forgotten when once indicated, and more easily determined, because selected from a narrower range of choice. The exact chronological locus of Alexander is 333 years before Christ. Everybody knows how brief was the career of this great man: it terminated in the year 325 before Christ. But the annus mirabilis of his public life, the most effective and productive year throughout his oriental annals, was the year 333 before Christ. Here we have another prial, a period of threes for the locus of Alexander, if properly corrected. Thus far the elements are settled, the chronological longitude and latitude of the two great planetary systems into which Greek literature breaks up and distributes itself: 444 and 333 are the two central years for the two systems; allowing, therefore, an interspace of 111 years between the foci of each.

Passing onward from Pericles, you find that all the